


Through Neighborly Eyes

by irhinoceri



Series: Out of the Dark Valley - Side Stories [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Adoptive Parents - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Side Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 21:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10907718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irhinoceri/pseuds/irhinoceri
Summary: Barriss, Ahsoka, and Mara live in hiding under false names on Mirial. Their neighbors never know quite what to make of them. Takes place between chapters 28 and 34 of Out of the Dark Valley. A warm up/intro to more side stories focusing on these characters in the timeline created by Out of the Dark Valley.





	Through Neighborly Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm not finished with the main story but as I've been working on it and Mara's struggle with finally confronting the Emperor again, I wanted to spend some more time thinking about how Barriss and Ahsoka raised her and how she changed as a person from when we see her last as a child, going off with Barriss, to when she reappears in Luke's life many years later. I don't know how many side stories I'll write or how involved they'll be. There won't be much of a plot to any of this just character exploration.

Mornia Alanti arrived in a small Mirialan town with her wife, a togruta woman, and their child, a human girl who might have been nine or ten, or thereabouts.

To be inconspicuous was now impossible.

They received no less than five neighborly visits on their first day. Along with polite small talk about the house—its previous owners, the ancientness of it, how it was settled into the earth at the end of the lane, the way the water pipes froze in the winter unless the taps were allowed to run at a trickle—they brought small gifts and questioning eyes.

They were polite and asked nothing, not at first.

The galaxy was a tumultuous place, filled with orphans and refugees. Clearly they wondered how and why a Sojourner would return to Mirial with her non-Mirialan family, but to ask outright would seem hostile, suspicious.

It was obvious that Mornia was one of the Sojourner Mirialan: people with Mirialan ancestry who lived off planet, either having left Mirial themselves, or were born to those who had. The residents could tell that about her before she even said it, before she told them that she had not been born or raised on Mirial, that she was not simply moving in from a different town or hemisphere. Though she wore a traditional Mirialan headcovering and had a bridge of diamonds over her cheekbones and on the backs of her hands, showing that she had been raised to respect the culture, there was still something about the way she walked, and talked, and interacted with others that betrayed her foreignness.

Most telling was her close ties to non-Mirialans. Her wife, whom she introduced as Ashla, caused quite a stir. There were whispers behind tattooed hands about the interspecies romance, though neighbors were quick to assure each other that they had no problems with it, of course not. She was beautiful and dynamic, a togruta with striking tiger stripe lekku, a lean and muscular frame, and an air of confidence even when she found herself surrounded by strangers. They found her likable, but she was still conspicuous.

The child, the human child who didn’t seem to have a hint of Mirialan ancestry about her, was another thing. Where, they wondered, had  _ she _ been picked up…? Such a sullen, scrappy, rude little red-headed thing she was. Celina was her name, and she had a sharp tongue. No offense to either Mornia or Ashla, who seemed very pleasant, but no one wanted that nasty little human girl playing with their children.

They needn’t have worried, though, because the Alantis proved to be politely reclusive and ever so secretive, particularly when it came to the girl. Side-long inquiries meant to ferret out whether the girl was Mornia’s own daughter, fathered by some human male, were met with evasive non-answers and deft changes of the subject. The two adults referred to her as “our daughter” and that was all that anyone got out of them.

Eventually, curiosity waned. Two married women with an adopted child was not, after all, such a strange thing, though the insular nature of Mirialan society meant that such a motley family was still an oddity. And yet once they were there, in the old cottage home down at the edge of town, they became no more remarkable than most.

Every family has its quirks, after all.

Ashla traveled a great deal. She was a merchant of some sort, or a traveling mechanic, or a cargo pilot, or something… no one was actually quite sure. They just knew that she was often away “for work” as Mornia would say, placidly. Mornia stayed home, kept house, raised the child. She had some medical training—from when she was younger, she said—and so she was sometimes called upon for advice about various injuries or ailments, or employed as a midwife. She did not send the girl, Celina, to school, instead opting for “a home education.” But that suited the community just fine.

From time to time, they would leave with Ashla for “a family vacation” and would not return for several months. The neighbors would look out for them, tending to their yard, watching out for burglars, making sure the pipes didn’t freeze. Eventually they would return.

The Alantis lived this way for seven years. Celina grew from a small, freckle-faced, irascible child into a young woman who was, it was supposed, passably pretty for a human. Though she continued to live a mostly secluded life at home, she was allowed at one point to enroll in the small local dance academy, and Mornia and Ashla looked undeniably proud of her when they attended her dance recitals.

She was not especially sociable with the other students. She became known as quiet, sardonic, and terse. But she was not a brat or a bully, and people had since stopped thinking of her as “that nasty human girl,” partially because they so rarely saw her and partially because she seemed polite enough to adults when they did come across her. Sometimes she was invited to birthday parties or over to neighbors’ houses. Sometimes, she even accepted such invitations.

One neighborhood boy, who lived in the house directly next door, fancied himself in love with Celina for a time. He threw pebbles at her window and tucked poems he had written on flimsiplast into flowers that he left at the door.

People shook their heads at him for mooning after her that way. Everyone else knew that she wasn’t quite one of them, and never really would be, no matter if she had been there for half a decade. No one expected her to stay for long. There was an undeniable air of impermanence about her, as if she would always only be passing through wherever she went.

She returned the poems with apologies, saying she just didn’t feel that way, and he persisted a little until Ashla paid the family a visit and said this really must stop and he was making Celina uncomfortable. He made a show of moping about and seeming crushed for a few days. But there were other girls, nice friendly Mirialan girls, and poems could be easily adapted with a change of reference to eye or hair color here and an adjustment to the rhymes that went with the name of the object of his affection, there. So he ended up alright.

Finally, at the end of seven years time, they disappeared in the middle of the night, leaving no word.

It was during the winter season, and it was an uncommonly cold winter, at that. A rare blizzard struck and the winds themselves seemed to carry the family off planet.

Rumors flew through the air like the falling snow. Some said that very strange visitors had come that night to take the women away, that people from their past whom they had been in hiding from finally found them.

Their next door neighbors said that the sound of mournful wailing had come from the quiet home and woken them, and despite the snow and the cold they had gone next door to find the house hastily deserted with blood stains left behind.

Some say the Empire came and arrested them, because they were fugitives, and now they were dead and gone, executed. Some said that they had been secretly members of the growing rebellion all along and their cover was blown and they needed to escape and find a new base of operations.

But no one knew anything for sure.

It was fitting, somehow, because none of them had known the Alantis very well. No one had known them at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Ashla and Celina are aliases that Ahsoka and Mara use in their respective canons, but Barriss' name is an adaptation of the phrase "mornië alantië" from the song May It Be, and means "darkness has fallen" in quenya.


End file.
